What Happens When Test Scores Drop?

In 2010, the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers unveiled the Common Core State Standards with the goal of better preparing students for college and career.

Associated Press

In part, the standards were a reaction against the No Child Left Behind Act, which allowed states to devise their own academic standards and assessments, with some setting a much lower bar than others.

The Common Core aimed to raise standards, but low scores on the first tests designed to gauge how well students absorbed the material provided a shock. In New York, one of the first states to administer Common Core tests, less than a third of students demonstrated proficiency in math and English. This was in stark contrast to earlier tests, when a majority of New York’s students achieved a ranking of proficient or better.

But while scores suffered, the relative performance of New York’s schools was largely unchanged, according an analysis by Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia Business School who studies school accountability.

“Schools’ average scores in 2013, the first year of Common Core, were very highly correlated with scores from 2012,” said to Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia Business School who studies school accountability. “In other words, high-scoring schools remained high scoring, and low-scoring schools remained low scoring.”

Mr. Rockoff plotted the performance of more than 3,000 schools including only those that had English and math scores in every year and didn’t change the size of their tested population by more than 15% from year to year.

Mr. Rockoff said it’s unclear whether parents and students should be comforted by his finding.

“It’s the same set of kids,” he said. “It’s the same set of teachers. Their school didn’t change dramatically overnight. The deeper question parents ought to be asking themselves is, ‘Did I know what my kid was learning last year, and if I compare it to the new Common Core curriculum, am I happy or sad?’ I would hope that many parents are going to the Common Core website, looking at the standards, looking at what their child is doing in school and asking is my child on the right track to be ready for college or career.”

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